November 11, 2025
Dialing like it’s 1985
Making a C64/C65 compatible computer: MEGAphone contact list and Dialer
Retro phone revival splits the crowd: genius throwback or gadget cosplay
TLDR: A retro MEGAphone update unveiled a split-screen contact list and dialer, shrinking the custom keypad from 12KB to 8KB and storing it in spare memory. Commenters split between nostalgia and privacy hype versus critics who slam landscape-only design and the lack of modern apps, sparking delightful retro drama.
The MEGAphone dev just dropped a juicy update, and the comments are chaos. The vision: a Commodore-style phone in permanent landscape with the screen split—messages on the right, calls on the left—and a big, dramatic CALL banner up top. The dial pad is crafted from custom glyphs (giant pixel blocks), trimmed from 12KB to 8KB by ditching empty pixels and tucked into unused memory. Translation: they’re squeezing a chunky keypad into a tiny attic. A tool called make-dialpad cuts the art so it fits—cue the retro cheers. Check the project at MEGA65.
Then the community went full soap opera. Nostalgia fans swooned—“therapy for 8‑bit souls”—while skeptics rolled their eyes at a sideways-only phone in 2025. UX folks begged for portrait mode and bigger buttons; privacy die-hards shouted “no app store, no tracking!” and pragmatists snapped back “no apps, no point.” Memes landed fast: “Press F1 to call mom,” “voicemail from a floppy,” and “fat‑finger mode when?” One hot take labeled it “art project, not a phone,” lighting up purists who insist fun and function can coexist. Another camp simply wants numbers bigger than their thumbs—no shame. Meanwhile, the coder ships; the crowd keeps refreshing hourly.
Key Points
- •The MEGAphone UI is split into halves: SMS thread on the right, active call display on the left; the contact list will also be implemented on the right with navigation from SMS.
- •A dial-pad will use FCM/NCM glyphs instead of sprites due to sprite limitations and color-changing complexity.
- •In 640x480 interlaced mode, each dial digit is designed as 8 chars wide by 4 high, costing about 1 KB per digit (≈12 KB total).
- •The dialpad generator tool (make-dialpad.c) was modified to omit all-zero interlaced glyph pairs, reducing asset size to ~8 KB.
- •Glyph data cannot reside in FCM cache (Banks 4–5); candidate storage is Bank 3 (C65 ROM area) or Bank 1’s $10000–$11FFF (CBDOS area), with assets loaded from SD to avoid bloating the binary.